The Blog Doctor.

TOP 10 SEO TIPS FOR BLOGS

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of altering your blog so that it gets ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. This being the HUNDREDTH POST of this blog I thought of doing a top-to-bottom SEO of my blog and in the process involve my readers also in optimizing their blogs. So login to your Dashboard and follow me on this comprehensive approach to optimize your blog.....

Before we start make sure you have reliable statistics about your current website traffic. You’ll want to compare performance of the site before and after
the optimisation has been carried out. You can do this by comparing statistics from any traffic counters you have installed in your blog.

STEP 1 - CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS.

A keyword is a word that best describes your web page. Before you even create your blog you have to choose your keywords. This is because you have to put them in the URL/Link you make in creating a new blog. Do not give your own name to your blog url unless it is already an easily recognized brand name. If you have not made it into a brand name it will not attract any traffic. Our objective in SEO is to attract as much traffic as possible.

Choose a subject you are going to blog about and research your keywords as shown in Keywords Tips and Tricks for Bloggers.

Primary keywords are the main keywords from which all keyword variations should derive. Your primary keywords should focus on your subject and not be too specific. Secondary Keywords are those which reference related subjects. For example if your Primary Keywords are Search engine Optimization then the Secondary Keywords will be Cascading Style Sheets, Web Design etc. Make a list of at least 500 words since you will be putting them in various parts of the blog title, headings, links, content and image tags.

Your blog URL should be made of the primary keyword which best describes your blog.
Check the availability of the URL and put your best keyword or keyword phrase in it. You can also combine your keywords into a phrase to put in your URL.

STEP 2 - THE TITLE TAG.

This is the second step while creating your blog. Do not give a title like "Welcome to my blog" and if you have such a title change it immediately to one showing the subject like "How to ...". Do not use words like AND which are considered as filler words. Instead use the pipe symbol as in "Bank Loans | Where To Find The Best Terms in the USA". Use your Primary Keywords first and then your Secondary Keywords. The recommended maximum number of characters for this tag is 60 including spaces.
In Blogger you can go to Settings----->Basic----->Title to set this tag. On the Edit Html tab it is represented by

<TITLE><data:blog.pageTitle/></TITLE>

Do not just put keywords in the title. It should be made of keyword phrases otherwise it will be considered as spam by search engines. In Blogger Blogs on opening a particular post the title is made of the "Blog Title : Post Title". Hence use your keywords in Post Titles also. The post title should be relevant to the content in the post. Do not use ALL CAPS in your titles as they become difficult to read.

STEP 3 - THE META TAGS.

The Meta tags are the Description Metatag and the Keyword Metatag and are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags usually the description first and then the keywords metatag. They look like this :

Description Meta:
<META NAME="description" content="Your most important keyword phrases should appear in this description.">

Keywords Meta:
<META NAME="keywords" content="keywords phrase 1, keyword phrase 2, keyword phrase 3, etc.">

Do not repeat keywords more than 2-3 times in these tags otherwise it is considered as spaming. Your Keywords Meta should not exceed 1024 characters including spaces. Also your Description Meta tag should not exceed 250 characters including spaces. You can use plurals and misspelt words within the keywords tags. The keywords in them should also be found within the content of your blog.

There is one more metatag in Blogger - META Robots Tag. The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites like Blogspot.

<meta content='index,follow' name='robots'/>

This instructs the search engine spiders to follow all the links and index the blog. If you want it to be a private blog put NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW instead.
See Default Metatag on Blogger for more information.

STEP 4 - THE CONTENT.

Each Post is made of the Post title, The content and The Tags at the bottom of the post. The Post Title should include the primary keywords and correspond to the content of the post. The title should be enclosed in Headings tags. Preferably post titles should be in bold. Each post should contain 200 to 300 words. This text should include your most important keyword phrases, but should remain logical & readable. Daily adding of relevant content is a priority. If not possible at least weekly. Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Use your
secondary keywords in the body of your post. Do not repeat the keywords too often. Keyword density should be between 4 to 8%. It’s most important to have them in the first 200 and last 200 words of the content. Make them BOLD or ITALIC. Do not use DUPLICATE CONTENT. Do not repeat content internally within the blog in different posts. Do not repeat content externally in other blogs. Do not copy content from other sites. Besides copyrighting issues Google will penalize sites having duplicate content.

Your content should be fresh and updated. It should also be relevant to the blog theme. If it is a blog about football any other widely disparate content will attract attention. Do not use "DIRTY CONTENT" if it is not an adult blog. That will cause the search engines to put your blog in a different category.

STEP 5 - HEADINGS.

The H tags are important starting with the lowest number, making the H1 tag the most important. Put all post titles and headings within these tags.
Put the primary keywords within these tags. Your headings and the content below them should match each other.

STEP 6 - IMAGES.

Your images should be small resolution so that the page loads fast. Do not use BMP images as they are big and load slowly. Name your images with your primary keywords. Use primary keywords within the ALT tags of images. They tell spiders and screen readers what that image is about. Do not cram a bunch of keywords into the "alt" attribute. Use no more than 2-3 per image. Use misspellings and plural keyword phrases here. Alternative text values should not exceed 80 characters in length. While naming images use dashes (-) when separating words. Dashes tell search engines that the word is separated. Underscores (_) tell search engines to read it as a whole.

STEP 7 - LINKS.

Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links. These are the words you highlight in the Post before clicking on the Link icon to enter the URL. Include your most important keyword phrases in the text that immediately preceeds, or follows the the hyperlink. The area round any link is more sensitive and the search engine spiders pick up the words from there. Do not overdo it and make sure that the text is readable.

Use an additional text navigation bar in the top, left or right areas of the blog in that order. The spiders go over your page in the order it is coded.

If you place the left sidebar code above your main column then it is the first to be spidered. An internally well-linked to document is considered as more important.

Use both internal links and external links. Refer to your other blog posts by inserting their links within your post. External links are important when they are from better Page Rank sites. One way links are weighed more heavily than reciprocal links.

STEP 8 - LOADING SPEED.

Your blog should be fast on its feet. There should not be any flash, Multimedia, Javascript or frames delaying the loading process. Search engines do not crawl Javascript produced content as it does not produce html. Search engines do not index framed pages. Use the Website Speed Test to see how fast your blog loads : http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test. It is also a good idea to use HTML links in the top-level main navigation on each of the pages of your site. Your web page should load in 10 seconds. Go to Blog Settings----->Formatting------>Show _ Posts on main page. Put this number as between 1 to 5 and save settings. Your blog will now load faster. Check your blog loading speed at

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

STEP 9 - SITEMAPS AND CODE OPTIMIZATION.

For Blogger there is no need to upload any sitemap files. When submitting the sitemap to Google use the Metatag method outlined in How to Submit to Google. Use CSS layouts instead of table layouts. This enables the search engine spiders to reach the content faster as they have less code to go
through. Get your code validated at http://validator.w3.org/ because if there is an internal code conflict it may halt the search spiders.

STEP 10 - REPEAT ALL ABOVE STEPS.

SEO is a technique which is applied after creating content and not during it. You have to repeat it from time to time so as to tweak your blog to be optimized and rise in the search engine results also called SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). There are some important things which you should not do to attract the spiders but that is the subject for another article.

Technorati Tags:seo, metatags, keywords, title, anchor link,

Blog Redirection.

Lots of blogs are being redirected to other sites to attract traffic. These blogs usually have a title designed to attract attention and when viewers click on the blog link they are redirected to other sites.....

For example one blog was named "A Hot Girl's Page..." and was redirected to "Nancy Live on Cam". I was interested in this phenomenon and decided to investigate how it was done. I pasted the url for "A Hot Girl's Page..." in my browser and stopped the browser just before it redirected. I then looked at the page source for this blog by going to View----->Page Source in Firefox. This blog only had one post in it. I scrolled down the page source and came upon this code in the posts section :

<div class='post-body'>
<p><META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0; URL=LINK OF DESTINATION SITE"></p>

The single post in the blog had no content and this code was pasted within that post. Nothing showed up in the blog page because there was no other content. This code caused the browser to be redirected to the DESTINATION SITE without any delay.
Do not try to search for this blog since it has been deleted by Blogger.

The importance of redirection lies in the fact that your own blog may be hacked and all traffic redirected to other sites. To avoid this it is important to see the methods used for redirection.

HTML REDIRECTION

This is the method used in the above example. The following code is used :

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url=http://site.com/page.html">

This code is pasted in the blog post or in the <head> section of the template. This causes the blog to redirect to http://site.com/page.html even when the browser has Javascript disabled. To delay the redirection a number is put after the "content=" like this :

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; url=http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html">

The delayed redirect has the advantage that you can place an extra message, such as “The page you are looking for changed location… You will be redirected automatically to the new location”

JAVASCRIPT REDIRECTION

This is the other method used. It does not work if Javascript is disabled in viewer's browser. The following code is pasted in the <head> section of the template.

<script>
window.location="http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html";
</script>

EXTERNAL JAVASCRIPT can also be used to redirect your blog. The way this works is that you may wish to incorporate a hack in your blog. You are then asked to paste this line above the </head> tag in your template :

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript" SRC="http://URL OF HACK SITE/jshack.js"></SCRIPT>

The jshack.js file is located at http://URL OF HACK SITE/ and contains the redirect code. You can see the full code when you type the whole address for the file in the address bar and press Enter.
To prevent this type of redirection do not add such codes in your template unless they come from a trusted site. You can also download the JS file and add the whole code instead of a link to the file.

JAVASCRIPT ALERT REDIRECTION

You can alert your viewers that they are being redirected using this Javascript code :

<script>
alert("This page has been moved to a new location... click OK to be redirected?");
location = "http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html";
</script>

To use a confirm dialog use this code :

<script>
if(confirm("This page has been moved to a new location... would you like to be redirected?"))
{
location = "http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html";
}
else
{
history.back();
}
</script>

FLASH REDIRECTION

Scripts embedded in Flash are also responsible for redirecting sites. Hence be careful when adding flash content to your sites. MySpace sites were redirected using Flash. Click here for more details.

PHP REDIRECTS

Though PHP is not used in Blogger for the sake of completion PHP redirects are done using this code :

<?php
header( 'Location: URL OF DESTINATION' ) ;
?>

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

All the above methods are used by hackers to redirect traffic from a blog with a high Page Rank to their site. These methods are recognized by search engines and can result in getting your site banned. Hence make sure to protect your blog by having strong passwords so that no one can hack into it and place these codes in your template. In case you do get complaints fro viewers that your blog is being redirected look for these codes and delete them from your template and change your passwords.

301 REDIRECT

This is the best method to prevent you from being penalized by the search engines. Unfortunately it cannot be used on Blogger. However, you can use it to redirect on ftp blogs. To do this locate your .htaccess file in the root directory of where all your web pages are stored. If there is no .htaccess file there, you can create one with Notepad or a similar application. Add the following lines after leaving a space after all the code :

redirect 301 /folder/page1.htm http://www.newsite.com/folder/newpage.htm

where /folder/page1.htm represents the original page and http://www.newsite.com/folder/newpage.htm represents the destination page. Leave the spaces as they are after 301 and before destination site URL. The 301 redirect is the safest way to preserve your rankings. On the next indexing, the search engine robot will obey the rule indicated in your .htaccess file and index the new page name every time a link or its internal database tries to access the old page. If your site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server then do this: In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”. Enter the redirection page, check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”. Click “Apply”.

Technorati Tags:blog redirection, html, javascript, seo,

Keyword Tips and Tricks for Bloggers.

Keywords are the means by which your blog is indexed and placed in the search rankings. It pays to do keyword research on your subject and use these keywords at appropriate places in your blog.........

After deciding on the subject of your blog (if it is based on a single subject) you will have to do some research to find out the correct keywords for your blog. First to see the competition for your keywords enter your subject line in the Google search box and hit Enter. Google will turn up all the websites having that keyword and the number of sites will also be listed.

Look at the Page source of your competing sites for the keywords they use by going to View--->Page Source.

Remember the number for your site will have to climb through that number to reach the top of the rankings. If you are still undecided on the subject it would be better to choose a subject where the competition is less and your site will appear on the first page of the search results.

You can also see the number of blogs on the same subject by conducting a search at Technorati.com for your subject keywords.

The market for your subject can be seen by going to sites like wordtracker.com and overture.com. Enter your keyword in the box and hit Enter and you will see how many people have been searching for that keyword. Always choose a subject with a large enough demand yet not too much competition. I have blogged about this in some detail in How to start a Blog.

The Title metatag should contain five to ten keywords. It should be descriptive about your site. Avoid having a title like "Welcome to...my site". Total numbe of eighty to ninety characters.

The description metatag should contain around 160 to 250 characters including spaces. The description should be summarized. The keyword metatag should contain your keywords in order of importance.

Commonly misspelt words and plurals should be included in the keywors tag.

Do not stuff it with keywords and do not repeat keywords. Around 800 to 1000 characters (40 to 45 words) with spaces seems to be the optimum size. You can repeat the keywords but not one after another, not continuously in a row and less than four times.

Google and now Alta Vista are now ignoring the keyword tag.

Separate each keyword and keyword phrase with commas. You can generate metatags automatically online based on the keywords you provide. Just Google for the term "metatag generator" and go to any one site, type in your data and then copy and paste the metatags in your blog template just below the <head> tag.

Use those keywords which are repeated in the body text and the other tags.

The keywords in the metatags should match the body context.

Do not indulge in Keyword spamming or Keyword stuffing. Search engines are aware of these strategies. Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. There are a number of online keyword density analyzers where you can submit your page for an analysis. As before Google for them to analyze your keywords. An optimum figure happens to be about 500 to 800 words per page with a keyword density of 5-8%.

Your images ALT attribute should also contain your keywords. Enter about two or three keywords in the ALT tag besides describing your image. Enter only those keywords you have already entered in all the other places above. For example :

<IMG SRC="url of your picture" width="100" height="90" alt="Beta Blogger for Dummies">

HEADINGS : All post headings should be enclosed in H1 tags. Your most important keywords should be repeated in the Headings.